Henry David Thoreau

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God’s handwriting – a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

It were better to be of no church, than to be bitter for any.

I do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.